


If blood be the price of the admiralty

by draculard



Category: Star Wars: Thrawn Series - Timothy Zahn (2017)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, F/M, Force Choking (Star Wars), Grief and Guilt, Hurt/Comfort, Nightmares, Panic Attacks, References to Outbound Flight, Sharing a Bed, The loneliness of command, Vomiting, survivor's guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-23
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-07 03:00:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26059888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: They're alone on a shuttle to their next mission site — just Faro, the Grand Admiral, and a handful of technicians — when Thrawn starts acting strange.
Relationships: Karyn Faro/Thrawn | Mitth'raw'nuruodo
Comments: 14
Kudos: 55





	If blood be the price of the admiralty

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Rudyard Kipling's "Song of the Dead."

He woke up coughing. 

The sound startled Faro awake, too, and in the darkness of the troop carrier there was a moment where she couldn’t tell where she was. The enlisted men in the main compartment were all asleep — she could tell by how quiet it was out there — but in _her_ compartment, the officers’ quarters, she and Thrawn were both very much awake.

She sat up on her elbows, squinting through the darkness at Thrawn’s bunk. He was still lying down, his forearms just barely visible as he clutched the blanket to him, covering his face as he coughed. 

Faro said nothing; her plan was to wait until he finished before she asked if he was okay. But that didn’t pan out because he simply didn’t stop coughing — what started out as a weak, raspy sound became deep and hoarse, sounding almost convulsive. Thrawn rolled over onto his side, his back to Faro; she could see the dim overhead lights shining off his blue skin as he pushed himself off the bed and staggered to the tiny refresher built into the opposite bulkhead.

Even with the door closed, she could hear him. It sounded like he was hacking up a lung. Faro sat up straight in her bed, now fully awake — anxiety thrumming in her veins even as she told herself it was fine, that it was just a cough. 

The next moment, the coughs abruptly ceased, replaced by the unmistakable sound of vomit splashing into the sink. 

“Damn,” Faro muttered, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. She hesitated there, watching the refresher door. Thrawn hadn’t bothered to turn on the light when he went inside, so there was no glow coming from the bottom of it. She adjusted the blanket over her lap as she listened; a faint retch, almost inaudible, sounded through the door and the vomiting began again. 

She had to hand it to him — as loud as the coughing had been, he was a remarkably quiet vomiter. She could barely hear anything now, and what she _could_ hear was only because she was listening hard. She forced back the urge to check on him, giving him another five minutes to get himself under control.

She moved away from the refresher uneasily. The thing was, she had no idea what was causing this. Earlier that day, she and Thrawn and a contingent of technicians had left from the _Chimaera_ midway through the dayshift with a vector for an uncharted system believed to be roughly two days away. They hadn’t stopped at any planets or waystations where Thrawn could theoretically pick up a disease; they hadn’t eaten anything other than the Navy’s normal rations, so that ruled out food poisoning. 

It was possible he’d just gotten sick out of nowhere, she supposed. Damn inconvenient timing, though — they couldn’t exactly abort the mission halfway through. Could they still go through with it if Thrawn was bed-bound the entire time? Probably — Faro had more than enough faith in her own capabilities, and knew Thrawn had hand-picked the technicians along for the ride. But still, it wouldn’t exactly be an optimal way to run things. 

In the fresher, the sink tap came on, completely wrenching Faro out of her thoughts. She listened as Thrawn rinsed the sink out and brushed his teeth, the occasional weak, muffled cough coming through. 

She was leaning forward with her elbows on her thighs when the fresher door opened again and Thrawn cautiously re-entered the compartment, one hand on the bulkhead for support. He paused as the shuttle swayed beneath them, rumbling through space, and then started toward his bunk.

Even in the dim light, Faro could see the sheen of cold sweat on his skin and the tremor going through his shoulders and arms. 

“Sir?” she whispered, hyper-cognizant of the technicians sleeping in the other room. “You alright?”

Thrawn’s stride, slow as it was, didn’t break at the sound of her voice. He walked to the side of his bunk and stood there a moment, one arm wrapped around his ribs and the other lifted so he could lay his hand on the back of his neck. He looked to be acclimating himself, maybe waiting for a sense of dizziness to fade — though Faro could only extrapolate based on her own experiences. 

“I’m alright,” he said, far too late to be convincing. His voice was hoarse and shaky; he made no attempt to sit down, instead just standing there and swaying slightly, like he hadn’t quite found his balance.

That did it for Faro — she stood and crossed the room to him quickly, putting her hands on his elbows and guiding him back toward the bed. He shook his head, refusing to be led, and when she glanced down at the sheets, she saw why. They were soaked through with sweat.

“Shit,” Faro muttered, still holding onto Thrawn’s arm. She could feel him trembling — just a little, but enough for her to notice — beneath her hand. 

“Sorry,” he breathed. Faro grimaced and stepped back, leading him back toward her own cot instead. He sat down gingerly on the far end of it, avoiding her tangled blanket. 

“How long have you been sick?” she asked him. 

“Sick?” he repeated flatly, scrubbing at his face with one hand. The other hand rested on Faro’s mattress, supporting his weight. 

“Yes,” said Faro patiently. “How long?”

Thrawn only shook his head. “I’m not ill.” 

Yeah, okay. Sure.

“I heard you vomiting,” Faro reminded him. She took a seat next to Thrawn, her thigh resting against his. His skin was cool to the touch. 

“That happens,” he said, resting his free hand on the column of his throat as if it ached. “I am not ill.”

“So, what, you just always wake up coughing like that?” Faro asked, not unkindly. Thrawn wouldn’t meet her eyes.

“Not always,” he said, staring off into the corner of the room. “Occasionally.” 

He looked fine, but she could feel him shaking still — from the physical stress of vomiting, she assumed, but she really couldn’t be sure. She watched him warily for a little while, unable to read the look on his face. Then, with a sigh, she pulled her legs up onto the bed and shifted so her back was against the wall.

“Lie down,” she told him.

He glanced at her, his expression inscrutable; he crossed his arms over his stomach, his posture looking almost protective, like he was waiting for someone to kick him in the ribs. 

“You can’t go back to your bunk,” Faro told him, pulling the blankets up so that the space next to her was free. “There’s plenty of room. Might as well get some sleep, right?”

For a long moment, she didn’t think Thrawn would agree. But then he lay down, his back to her, both of them pressed uncomfortably close in the small bunk. Faro lifted her arm, putting it around Thrawn’s waist so it wouldn’t be pinned between the two of them. He shifted closer to her in response, relaxing so quickly it surprised her. 

But he was still shivering. 

Faro pulled the blanket back up over both of them, hoping it would at least somewhat trap their body heat. She needn’t have worried; within a minute — whether it was because of the blanket or her own high temperature — they were both comfortably warm. She closed her eyes, her nose pressed against the base of Thrawn’s neck; she could feel him trembling in fits and spurts beneath her hand.

And then, gradually, the shaking faded away. She could feel Thrawn breathing deeply as he sunk into sleep, dropping away fast. He relaxed into her arms completely, letting her hold him as he slept. His hand wrapped loosely around hers, clasping it to his chest. 

_Occasionally,_ he said earlier. _Occasionally,_ he wakes up coughing so hard that he vomits.

 _Who does that?_ Faro wondered. She tightened her grip on him, pulling him close so that his back was snug against her abdomen. In the morning, she noted wryly, this moment right here would seem like insanity — snuggling with her commanding officer, someone she couldn’t even confidently call her friend — but for now, she was so tired and so eager to get back to sleep — for _both_ of them to get back to sleep — that she didn’t care.

* * *

Thrawn was already awake, showered, and dressed by the time Faro came to the next morning. Any chance they might have had to talk about it — assuming he would even be open to a conversation — was trashed by his morning routine. He was already plugged into the HoloNet when Faro awoke, on a conference call with what looked like at least five other admirals. 

He gave Faro a hand signal, confirming that his camera wasn’t pointing her way so she could get up and go about her day. She changed in the cramped fresher, wetting her hair in the shower but not bothering to actually wash. For now, she barely even had the energy to rub the sleep out of her eyes. 

Outside, she eyed the technicians warily, trying to figure out how much they’d heard. None of their faces gave anything away. She joined them for a morning meal of rations bars and caf so hot it burnt her tongue; for a long moment after she finished eating, Faro weighed the awkwardness of going back to Thrawn against the awkwardness of staying here with the techs, who were so uncomfortable with their XO’s presence that conversation had dried up entirely.

Reluctantly, she collected another rations bar for Thrawn, balanced it with two mugs of caf, and returned to the cramped officers’ quarters down the hall. She had to bump the door release with her elbow to get in; the shuttle floor lurched beneath her feet as she stepped inside, but Faro moved with it gracefully, shifting her feet against the plates to keep the caf from spilling.

“Well done,” Thrawn murmured when she set his mug down next to him. Faro’s eyebrows raised; she hadn’t seen him glance up when she came inside, but he must have noticed the balancing act nonetheless.

“It’s not really impressive, sir,” she said. “Everyone gets their space legs eventually.”

Thrawn sipped his caf and quirked his eyebrow at Faro in a facial shrug. “Imperial ships are exceptionally smooth,” he demurred. “Finding balance here requires months of experience on smaller spacecrafts such as this, something not every Imperial officer has the opportunity to achieve; for some, however, it is an inherent talent.”

Faro bit her lip; she wasn’t entirely sure if Thrawn meant this as a compliment or an insult. With any other admiral, it would be a sneer aimed at the time Faro had spent on gruntwork as an ensign, taking missions planet-side that few other officers ever needed to do. But with Thrawn, it was different. She supposed he probably valued gruntwork like that. Maybe he thought it built character, but more likely he just respected anyone who recognized that it needed to be done and had the wherewithal to do it.

Across from her, Thrawn set his mug of caf down and held up a hand, silencing her — even though she hadn’t decided what to say yet — as he answered another holo-call.

“I apologize for the video quality, Governor,” he said in greeting. Faro craned her neck and saw that there was nothing wrong with Thrawn’s video feed, but he appeared to have manually set it to ‘scramble.’ “You had a report for me on the situation in Lothal?”

He hit the mute button on his own microphone before Governor Pryce had even finished the word, ‘Yes.’ As she recited her report — a long-winded one, Faro guessed from her tone — Thrawn leaned forward onto his crossed arms and glanced up at Faro. 

“The new aide you assigned me won’t last,” he said.

Faro raised her eyebrows. “No?”

“No,” said Thrawn. He gestured down to his holopod. “Vanto knew better than to schedule calls while I was on a mission. This one seems to have missed my hints that our shuttle should be considered ‘out of range’ until we return.”

Faro did her absolute best to hide her smile. She sat down on the cot next to Thrawn so she could see his makeshift desk, composed of a breakfast tray carefully balanced on his knees. “I’ll have a talk with him about it when we get back,” she said. She could tell from the dazed look in Thrawn’s eyes that he was listening to her and Pryce simultaneously; when she handed him his rations bar, he just barely opened his palm to receive it.

“Very good, Governor,” he said abruptly, pressing the unmute button just in time for a natural-sounding response. He scanned over a list Pryce had sent him, processing the whole thing in the time it took Pryce to take a deep breath and launch into more detail. “I’ll look over the data you sent me and return to you with a response,” said Thrawn, interrupting her smoothly.

He severed the connection before she could get another word in. Thrawn banished the data she’d sent him at once and started up another call with his free hand; he held the rations bar at an angle with the other hand, tearing open the wrapper almost delicately with his teeth. 

This time, Faro noted, he didn’t bother to scramble the video feed. Ensign Rairns answered the call — selecting the hologram option for his own feed, like the Emperor did — and gulped when he saw Thrawn’s face. 

“Admiral, sir,” he said nervously. “Orders, sir?”

Thrawn slid his eyes over to look at Faro. To Ensign Rairns, his face would appear totally blank. To Faro, who knew him better, the reproachful cast to his eyes was subtle but clear; she grimaced an apology back at him. She should’ve known better than to assign him an aide fresh out of the Academy, who still couched his sentences with honorifics on both ends.

Turning back to the ensign, Thrawn said, “Commodore Faro has some instructions for you on HoloNet etiquette, Ensign. I’ll turn you over to her.”

He shifted the tray to Faro unceremoniously, forcing her to abandon her caf mug on the cot between them. She wanted to protest — to force Thrawn to deal with it himself — but he’d taken a large bite of his rations bar at a strategic moment and was now chewing it as slowly as he could, leaving him incapable of conversation whether he wanted to speak or not.

“Ensign,” said Faro diplomatically, “I regret to inform you that Admiral Thrawn is not the _Chimaera’s_ comms officer.”

The ensign winced. Next to her, Thrawn’s eyebrow twitched; he looked faintly approving. Faro ran through the communications protocols a little less glibly after that, giving Ensign Rairns a run-down on the general order of things — the numerical codes assigned to each message and what they signified, with particular emphasis that Governors and Moffs did not, in fact, automatically deserve to be handled by senior officers, no matter how much they might try to convince him otherwise.

When she ended the transmission, Thrawn had slowed down significantly on his rations bar, evidently content that he wouldn’t need it as an excuse to avoid calls anymore. He nodded his thanks to her as he chewed. 

“You can have your _own_ conversations with your aide, sir,” Faro told him. 

Thrawn shrugged.

“This is the fifth time you’ve had me pass messages along to him,” Faro said. She could hear the note of complaint in her voice and didn’t bother to suppress it; Thrawn wouldn’t reprimand her for it, anyway. “I won’t do it again. You can reassign him yourself if he’s incompetent.”

She watched the column of his throat shift as he swallowed — finally. His face was blank, eyes hooded, impossible to read. Then, instead of answering her, he lifted the rations bar to take another bite, and Faro had to put her hand on his wrist to stop him.

“ _Sir_ ,” she said impatiently.

He lowered the rations bar, face blank. “I unsettle him. It’s best for you to handle such issues. You do not frighten him.”

“ _Frighten_ him?” Faro repeated. She opened her mouth, ready to deny the idea that Thrawn could frighten anybody, then reevaluated her stance. Of _course_ he was frightening; sure, once you got to know him — got past the intimidating appearance, compared him with other Imperial officers and realized how understanding and encouraging he could be — the effect was lessened somewhat, but she couldn’t pretend he wasn’t frightening _ever,_ to anyone.

 _“I_ can be frightening,” she said instead of arguing with him.

“Oh,” said Thrawn, turning to glance at her with hooded eyes, “I’m aware. But you have an advantage with Ensign Rairns.”

Faro handed him his breakfast tray back with a sigh and retrieved her mug of caf, cupping it between her hands. “What’s that? That I’m human?”

“Perhaps slightly,” said Thrawn with a frown, as if he hadn’t considered it before. “I only mean you haven’t lost your temper with him.”

Faro’s eyebrows shot up. She stopped herself mid-sip to stare at him. “And you _have_?”

Thrawn broke eye contact, ducking his head. 

“You _never_ lose your temper,” Faro protested. She thought back over the few instances of muted anger she’d seen from Thrawn, usually aimed not just at incompetence but at _deadly_ incompetence, like she’d seen from Pryce and Skerris. Even then, Thrawn hadn’t raised his voice. “Do you mean you got a little sharp with him, sir?” she asked. “I speak a little Sy Bisti. You can say what you mean in that language, if you think it’ll help.”

Thrawn sat back, clasping his hands over the tray. “Perhaps. _Ngephelalwa ngimsondu._ ”

Faro processed this, translated it in her head, and winced. “You lost your temper,” she said aloud, translating it directly. “That really doesn’t tell me much, sir. What did you do? Reprimand him? Yell at him over something? File a counseling?”

Was it her imagination, or did Thrawn grimace at that?

“All three,” he admitted. “The counseling was petty. I’ve struck it from his record already.”

“Damn,” Faro said, sitting up a little straighter. She wasn’t sure she’d ever seen a negative counseling on file from Thrawn himself; positive ones, sure, and plenty of them. They carried more weight coming from an admiral, he said. But the negative ones, when necessary, were left to officers far lower-ranking than him. “What did he do?”

“He, ah…” Thrawn adjusted the tray over his knees, staring down at his hands rather than at Faro. “He was given to understand that the admiral’s aide is permitted quarters directly adjacent to the admiral’s suite.”

He went silent; Faro, watching him, took a moment to realize that was the end of the sentence. A line appeared between her eyebrows. 

“The admiral’s aide _is_ permitted quarters directly adjacent to the admiral’s suite,” she said. “You _do_ know that, don’t you, sir?”

He shot her an exasperated look. “Commander Vanto did not take advantage of that provision.”

“So?” said Faro, genuinely confused. “He didn’t _have_ to. What, do you think Ensign Rairns doesn’t deserve it? The quarters aren’t _that_ nice, sir. They’re the same as any officers’ room, just ... right next to yours, instead of a level down.”

“I see no reason Ensign Rairns should need them, then,” said Thrawn stiffly, turning his head away. Faro studied him a moment, trying to read what little she could see of his face.

“Okay, so he tried to move in without checking first to make sure he was allowed,” she said, “and you lost your temper on him. Is that a decent read on the situation?”

Begrudgingly, Thrawn nodded his head. 

“So what happened, exactly?” Faro asked. “You caught him moving his things in after his shift, and…?”

Thrawn inhaled, sharply at first and then slowly, taking his time with the breath. “And I said nothing to him at the time,” he said. 

Faro blinked. So she’d miscalculated the series of events somehow. She recalibrated, opened her mouth to start again.

“The issue arose several days later,” Thrawn said before she could. “When he attempted to access my quarters in the middle of the night.”

“He tried to enter your _room_?” Faro repeated, scandalized. Thrawn kept his eyes fixed on the far wall. If he shared Faro’s sense of outrage, he didn’t show it. 

“He heard me coughing,” he said. 

The sounds of the shuttle closed in on them, sucking every intelligent response Faro could come up with into the vacuum of space. She ran her thumb over the rim of her mug, letting the steam ghost against her skin. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Thrawn, but couldn’t read his face. 

“Does that mean we’re going to talk about last night?” she asked. 

Thrawn simply sat there for a moment, saying nothing. Then, with a sigh, he stood and secured his tray and holopod in the storage locker above his cot. When he sat back down, he cradled his mug between his hands the same way Faro did, mirroring her posture. 

“You’ll see to it that the ensign is reassigned?” he asked her. Faro felt a flicker of disappointment, but hid it well.

“I’ll arrange something,” she said. “He’s not untalented. And there are plenty of other candidates; we could assign you multiple aides if you like, get rid of the quarters question entirely—”

Thrawn was already shaking his head. “One will suffice.”

For a long moment, neither of them said anything. Faro sipped the last dregs of her caf and waited for Thrawn to finish his, figuring she might as well refill his at the same time she refilled hers — but he only held his mug and stared at the wall, apparently disinclined to drink.

“Did Vanto know?” Faro asked him finally.

His eyelashes moved slightly; if it weren’t for that, Faro wouldn’t have noticed him reacting at all. 

“We shared a room at Royal Imperial,” Thrawn said with a tiny shrug. “I daresay he noticed.”

When Faro only watched him, saying nothing, he looked her way briefly and met her eyes.

“I apologize for last night,” he said. The words rushed out of him; before Faro could process the change in tone, he’d looked away again. “It was not appropriate on any level.”

“It’s understandable,” said Faro diplomatically. “You were distressed.”

“That does not make it understandable,” Thrawn said. Though his expression could best be described as _bored_ , Faro could see a line of tension in his jaw that suggested otherwise.

“Well, I didn’t see it as inappropriate,” she said. “There was nowhere else for you to sleep. Anyone else would have done the same.”

If possible, Thrawn’s jawline tensed even further. 

“Not true,” he said tightly. “And that is precisely why it was inappropriate.”

Faro’s mouth fell open, but before she could come up with a response, Thrawn stood and turned to her, taking the mug from her unsuspecting hand. He disappeared through the door to the troop transport a moment later without a word. Faro only hoped he would bring her back a refill instead of throwing the mug in the washer. 

She looked down at the cot beneath her. The sheets were dry now, with no lingering smell of sweat — or at least, none that she could detect. Thrawn could obfuscate all he wanted, but he couldn’t make her forget what had happened — nightmares like that, if they were indeed nightmares and not symptoms of a chronic illness he’d kept hidden, weren’t the sort of thing she could easily forget. 

She picked up her datapad and, with a quick glance at the closed door, keyed for the official Imperial file on Thrawn. It was a quick read, providing her with no new information — she’d read it before and remembered noting his victory record and, more importantly, the number of courts-martial he’d been through. She’d thought perhaps there might be information hidden in the file that didn’t seem significant to her before but would now — battle injuries, perhaps, or mentions of medbay stays.

There was nothing. So far as she could tell, Thrawn had never been injured in the line of duty — or at least, not in _Imperial_ duty. Pulling up Vanto’s file, she found more of the same. She switched the datapad off at the exact same moment that Thrawn re-entered the room, two mugs of fresh caf in his hands. He handed one of them to her with a noticeable scowl.

“What did you do at Royal Imperial when you had these coughing fits?” asked Faro. If she didn’t keep taking shots at him, she knew the topic would die here and now, and she’d never get any answers. Thrawn’s eyebrows twitched, but he didn’t look entirely surprised at the question. 

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Did you wake Vanto?”

“Intentionally?” Thrawn asked. When Faro only shrugged, he stared at her for a moment, as if contemplating whether to answer. Finally, he re-took his seat on the cot nearby. “No,” he said. “But it was unavoidable. I imagine he would only sleep through it if he were drugged.”

That was about what Faro expected. She blew the steam off her caf and took a cautious sip. “So what did he do about it?” she asked.

Thrawn’s eyebrows furrowed, his lips turning downward into a frown. “Nothing,” he said, sounding puzzled by the question. “He went back to sleep.”

“He didn’t help you?” Faro asked.

Now Thrawn turned to face her, the confusion clear on his face. “Help me?” he asked. “With what? He can’t clear my lungs for me.”

Faro seized on that at once, relieved to finally get a proper hint at what was going on. “So there’s something wrong with your lungs?” she asked. 

“There’s nothing wrong with me at all,” said Thrawn sharply, his voice falling _just_ on the polite side of a snap. Exasperated, he looked away from Faro; when he finally turned back, he had his facial expressions under control again and looked cold and almost apologetic all at once. “I’m not ill, Commodore.”

“Then what is it?” asked Faro, keeping her voice neutral, non-confrontational. “A nightmare?”

She expected Thrawn to refute this. He didn’t. Eyebrows raised, Faro found herself recalibrating once again. 

“That’s different, then,” she said, more gently this time. “All soldiers have nightmares, sir. That’s not odd at all.”

When he didn’t respond, she felt compelled to convince him.

“I have nightmares occasionally,” she said, “where I’m on the bridge of the _Chimaera_ , watching our TIE fighters fly directly into a trap. I try to warn them, but I can’t get the transmission to go through. The details are always a little different; sometimes I’m part of the squadron myself, sometimes I’m part of the clean-up crew. I always see the aftermath, when of course, in real life…”

Thrawn was watching her closely, his eyes somehow seeming more intense than usual. Faro found herself making eye contact for longer than she was comfortable with, her mouth going dry. Eventually, she forced herself to look away … but Thrawn didn’t, and her cheeks turned warm beneath his gaze.

“We see the aftermath in real life,” he told her, his voice quiet and grim. “We both do. All visits to the _Chimaera’s_ morgue are logged.”

Faro grimaced. He was right, of course. She knew it was unwise, but she visited the bodies, anyway. She couldn’t let her men be spaced before confirming the deaths with her own eyes; occasionally, she’d passed Thrawn on his way out just as she was going in, but they’d never spoken about it before.

“You don’t cough when you have your nightmares, I suppose,” Thrawn said, pulling her out of her thoughts. There was an almost dry quality to his voice that turned Faro’s grimace into a dark smile.

“No,” she said. “They’re not quite so dramatic as yours.”

He was offended by that, she could tell, but he did his best not to let it show. 

“I just wake up afterward,” Faro explained, “and stare at the ceiling until I fall asleep again. Sometimes that doesn’t work; I have to read reports or go for a midnight workout at the gym. Or I just give up and get an early start on my morning caf.”

Thrawn looked down at the mug in his hands, lips twitching. When Faro leaned closer to him, bumping his shoulder with her own, he didn’t move away. 

“So what are yours about?” she asked.

He glanced at her, and for a moment — so fast Faro could scarcely register it — his face was so uncharacteristically soft that it froze her breath in her lungs. 

“They’re similar to yours,” he said, “but based in fact. I dream that I’m in command of a ship — the _Chimaera_ or any I’ve helmed in the past — and I can see my crew headed for disaster, but I can’t tell them how to avoid it. Not because I don’t know; because I can neither speak nor breathe. Nor can I fight the invisible force choking me; I can only watch as the lasers fire.”

He lifted a hand as he spoke, unconsciously massaging his throat. _Based in fact,_ he said — Faro could only assume it was something that had happened before he joined the Empire. Would he answer questions about it, if she asked? Probably not — not yet, at least. Perhaps he’d already answered too many questions today.

Gently, she wrapped her fingers around his wrist and tugged his hand away. He lowered it from his throat to the mattress of the cot between them. His hand was unresponsive beneath hers, as if he didn’t feel her there at all, but when she started to move away, his fingers twitched and he pulled her back.

His face was expressionless; his eyes were set on the far wall. Faro knew better than to wait for him to speak. 

They sat there for the better part of an hour, and neither of them said a word.


End file.
